Throughout history, "nature" has always been enormously important for every human population, not just an economic capital but as cultural/symbolic capital. The self identity of a people is often symbolized by a particular representation of nature, such as the land of succulent ears of rice (mizuho no kuni), for Japan, or cherry blossoms representing the Japanese. We think of these various types of "nature" as lying out there beyond the cultural realm. Yet, most "natures" are culturally construed. It is important to understand this complex interplay between "nature" and "culture" in order to truly understand our attitude toward "nature" and be able to live harmoniously with it - the goal of the Commemorative Foundation for the International Garden and Greenery Exposition. The human presence on earth starts with hunting-gathering economies. My work on the Ainu and other hunter-gatherers tells me that they were quite "ecologically minded." They would not peel a bark from a tree in its entirety to make their bark cloth. Instead, they would peel only a part of it so that the bark on the tree would rejuvenate itself. They are usually not wasteful, as some of other peoples are today. Therefore, the Apache, for example, use a metaphor of "caterpillars" for white people - caterpillars eat only a part of a leaf and move on to another, just like white people would eat part of a loaf of bread and discard the rest. In contrast to hunting-gathering economy, the first thorough transformation of "nature" is agriculture, that is, plant domestication, together with animal domestication - pastoralism. Both represent "domestication" or "culturalization" of nature. Yet, these culturalized forms of nature became an important symbol of the "back to nature" theme among many peoples. For example, during the Edo period in Japan when urbanization was intensified, the countryside was valorized in poems, woodblock prints, etc. In fact it was this period when Japan came to be envisioned with certain symbols of nature that represented permanency, that is, enduring features of Japan and the Japanese. They include Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms, and a green stretch of rice paddies with newly planted seedlings. These cultural symbols of Japan were disseminated especially through woodblock prints of famous masters, such as Hokusai and Hiroshige. The mental image of green rice paddies became engraved in the mind of the people and the symbolic representation of "Rice as Self" was established (for details, see my book Rice as Self, Princeton Univ. Press, 1993; Kome no Jinruigaku, Iwanami Shoten, 1995). Japan is by no means unique in this respect. Pastoralism began to represent an idealized simplified life in the countryside, in addition to its symbolic presence in Christianity - Christ the lamb, pastor and flock, etc. In the 14th century book illustrations, Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry by Le Duc Jean de Berry (1340-1416), housed in Musee de Cluny in Paris, each month of the year is depicted by farmers working in the field side by side with those tending the grazing animals. The wealthy could enjoy "nature" in their own compounds, as did Marie Antoinette who built a little farm in Versailles where she played at raising sheep, as we can visit today. Like the Japanese masters of woodblock prints, French artists saw "nature" in rural France. Countless painters, both major and minor, chose rural France as their artistic subject. The "grain stock" series by Monet (1840-1926) and paintings of farmers and shepherds (L'Angelus, Des Glaneuses, etc.) by Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) are the most celebrated examples, but there are many others. England's natural beauty was reified by a series of painters - William Kent, Lancelot (`Capability') Brown, and Humphrey Repton, among others - who painted this constructed "nature." Even in classical times (R. Williams 1973:46-54), people longed for the rural. For Athenians, the life on the farm was a garden of the gods of the by-gone days. The countryside cum nature began to appear in fine arts, on the chocolate box, and imaginations of urbanites in Athens, Edo, Paris and London in an idealized form - that is, sans sweat and manure - and became contrasted both with urban centers, on the one hand, and "wild nature," on the other. While the tripartite scheme of "countryside as nature/city/wild nature" may be a widely held cross cultural pattern, I might point out here that Japanese "nature" is almost unique in that it has been inhabited by soul-owning plants and is marked by the absence of animals. This originates with notion that plants were deities and especially each grain of rice embodied the soul of the deity. Thus, when the wilderness was transformed into the land of succulent ears of rice, as one version of the 8th century myth history Kojiki tells us, plants became dominant, as it were, writing off from history the hunting that preceded their agriculture. Today, the Japanese refer to the dai-shizen (Great Nature) of America, they think of untamed nature with plants and animals. But when the term is applied to Japanese nature it rarely includes animals in their mental image. Its inhabitants are plants and birds that are messengers from the deities to humans. It follows that the enormously masculine image of wild nature, captured in the "Man the Hunter" image, has little appeal to the Japanese. It was not too long ago that the Mao's Cultural Revolution used agriculture and peasants as the ideal of Chinese identity, while persecuting intellectuals and others who stood for corrupted existence. Today, agricultural protectionism is a widespread policy in many countries, including the United States and the EEC except the United Kingdom. Highly industrialized nations tend to have heavy agricultural subsidies, while predominant agricultural nations do not. The former is reluctant to eliminate farms from their landscapes - they cannot afford to let "nature" go. Progress on the creation of the European Community has been hampered by an inability to agree on a common agricultural policy because differentially subsidized food exports affect the common monetary system. The Uruguay Round of GATT had the hardest time over disagreements over agricultural policy. Consider also that only plant foods become "natural foods" that presumably are healthy for the body. Last but least is our memory of the 1993 rice importation issue in Japan. It reaffirmed the symbolic power of rice for self-identity even at a time when Japan produced an oversupply of rice and the government paid rice farmers to fallow their fields. The public discourse in mass media at the time involved the recurrent spatial metaphor of rice paddies as our land; the paddies also purify our air and serve as dams. California rice, in contrast, was grown in American paddies, thus serving their land and air, and not ours. The equation of self-sufficiency with exclusive reliance on domestic rice was frequently used as a discursive trope. Rice stood for the lifeblood crop, the lifeline; the last sacred realm, the last citadel; national life; and the prototype of Japanese culture. Why does nature, often represented by agriculture, so important to peoples for whom it has no longer economic values? The key is to understand the longing for "nature" is not simply a longing for the spatial unit, namely, the countryside. But, the countryside, agriculture and all that represent "nature" symbolize also the time past or lost. It represents the past when one's society/land was devoid of contaminations of urbanization, industrialization, and, for non-Western countries, Westernization. In short, "nature" symbolizes the spatial and temporal primordiality - the self of the people at its pure stage. In order to understand human relationship with "nature," it is important, therefore, to understand a complex and multiple ways with which humans construct their "nature," while constantly domestication it. As I write this essay, Japan is a land of cherry blossoms - the topic of my current research. But, most cherry trees we enjoy today are almost all "domesticated" varieties - species that are a result of crossbreeding, like the ubiquitous somei yoshino variety, while in ancient Japan "mountain cherry trees" were the only ones. Since humans continue to domesticate nature, we must realize what we are doing and then deliberate upon "how" we do so, lest "nature" be completed destroyed.

Emiko Ohnuki University of Wisconsin, Madison (Japan, anthropologist, symbolic anthropology)

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